Introduction

Abstract

For those visited by tragedy it is of little comfort that fatal incidents in outdoor education (OE) – understood here as educational activities involving adult-supervised young people in the outdoors – are very rare. For those in charge of such a program, that a death was unlikely could be scant protection from the material consequences of any preventable fatality. Many incidents turn out, on investigation, to have been preventable and to have had precedents. For a parent, the idea that a child might not return alive from a camp or excursion is almost unthinkable, particularly in circumstances where a child would not have died if only lessons from the past had been learned. Apart from the impact on bereaved relatives and friends, fatal incidents, particularly those involving multiple deaths, can and do have implications beyond any single organisation. In the aftermath of a tragedy, OE policy, purposes, and practices can be the subject of intense public scrutiny, the implications of which can reverberate for many years.